Comment on the Shift of English Language from a Highly Synthetic Language into an Analytic One 英语论文.doc

Comment on the Shift of English Language from a Highly Synthetic Language into an Analytic One Nowadays, English is a global language, and there are more than 370million people who speak English as their first language. But even for these native English speakers, if you present a page of old English to them, they may look at it more strange than look at a page of French or Italian because of the huge differences between old English and modern English. Generally speaking, old English distinguishes from modern English in such aspects as spelling, pronunciation, the lexical and the grammar. Of these differences, grammar is of fundamental feature that makes old English different from the language of today. Old English is a highly inflectional language. Inflectional languages fall into two classes: one is synthetic, the other is analytic. Synthetic language is also called inflected language. It refers to one in which its meaning is expressed by inflectional endings, not by word order. Synthetic language uses inflectional forms, such as affixes, as primary means of indicating the grammatical function of the words in the language. In Indo-European languages, these most commonly take the form of endings on the noun and pronoun, the adjective and the verb. The opposite of a synthetic language is an analytic language, also known as isolating language. It refers to one in which every morpheme forms a separate word, and individual particles are used to convey grammatical functions. In analytic language, the word forms are mostly or totally fixed, and grammatical functions are indicated through the use of helper words and word order. Chinese is an example of an analytic language. Modern English is also an analytic. In Modern English, the subject and the object do not have distinctive forms, nor do we have inflectional endings to indicate the other relations marked by case endings in Latin, except in the possessive case and in pronouns. The development of English from